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Running the BW9 Mac Public Preview

This forum is dedicated to discussion of the BibleWorks 9 Mac Public Preview version. Please note that the Public Preview is still under development but works well enough that we felt comfortable releasing it for our Mac users to try. From our testing, the Public Preview runs what 95% of our users use. There are known bugs with it (see below), and these are documented and in queue for repair.

We cannot offer full support for this version as it is still under development. Users who need full compatibility and functionality are encouraged to run in a VM (like Parallels, VMware Fusion, or VirtualBox) or to dual-boot. For details on the various options for Mac users, please consult this dedicated page: http://www.bibleworks.com/content/mac.html

Grateful for your support and interest,

The BibleWorks Team

Known Issues in BW9 Mac Public Preview

Editor Tab, Notes Tab, and all RTF controls: RTL typing in Unicode Hebrew not working

Lack of sizing borders and sizing thumb overlapping other controls

RTF tables in Editor and Notes Tabs

Text-to-Speech not working

Some ERMIE functionality unstable

The Customize Toolbar window for the main button bar, editor button bar, and notes button bar does not display buttons.

Editor, Notes: Copying or pasting large amounts of text (e.g. 200KB) to clipboard does not display hourglass cursor and takes a very long time. Crashes when pasting in 600KB.

Editor, Notes: Copying large amounts of text (e.g. 200KB) to clipboard with Ctl-C does not work, but doing a copy from the context menu (two-finger tap) does copy the same data.

Printer support (Editor, Flashcards, Diagrammer): Job is trapped in print queue and requires manual intervention/login (Printer is network printer requiring auth.). Blank pages: After further investigation we noticed that it's relying on EM_SETTARGETDEVICE and EM_FORMATRANGE to print from the rich edit control.

Submenus: Large submenus obscure the parent menu and make it challenging to navigate to other items in the parent menu.

CHM: Clipboard copy does not copy RTF version or HTML to clipboard. Need to support font and table layout (e.g. Wallace-ESNT clipboard samples).

InstallShield: Opening parent folders in the treeview (like German Bibles, English Bibles, etc.) opens the treeview, but scrolls to bottom of the entire treeview.

Display/searching issues with Arabic, Czech, Korean, Japanese, Polish, Romanian, Slavonic. For Arabic/Japanese/Korean, setlocale() on "Arabic", "Korean", and Japanese" fail and so they do not appear as available Bible versions. Under Lion: Chinese,Cyrillic, Lithuanian,Thai,Turkish have display issues.

Editor: selecting and dragging down to the bottom of the window should auto-scroll the window without having to wiggle the cursor continually.

CL morphology helper not forwarding keys to Command Line: WTM [ret] .dbr@ || Typing n or p or x should copy the keystroke to the CL. Focus is jumping to the dropdown menu instead of the CL. Same for BGM, SCM, etc.

Mss tab: zoom 50%, mousing over a verse reference tag pops up the verse, but the image under the verse popup is not redrawn when the verse disappears. Same redraw problem when menus or context menus are opened over the image area, and when other windows are moved over the image.

Hebrew in RTF, HTML controls: a) Unicode Hebrew vowel points and accents not aligned with consonants in all RTF controls, and all HTML controls (e.g. all CHMs, Daily Light, Editor, Notes, PMT, RVT, Verse Tab, Mss HTML Viewer). See also NET bible CHM in gen 1:1; b) highlighted Hebrew words are displayed out of order; c) English verse reference displayed out of order (See Phrase Matching Tool using WTM, Gen 1:1). d) Help | Daily Light | Greek/Hebrew: All of the September entries have garbage for the first (last) Hebrew word. e) Also the Hebrew vowel pointing is not correctly aligned; f) Garbaged char in NET Hos 1:4, fn 19. g) Selecting mixed English and Hebrew blanks out areas of the text j) Copying selected search result for WTT from the Search Window to the Editor (notes window) cuts off the first character of the verse when right justified. k) The same thing happens when you hit "return" when the cursor is in the little biblical passage selection window in the Notes Tab toolbar. "Return" pastes the passage into the notes area, but cuts off the first letter of the passage when right justified. L) loading Gen 12:4 into Editor produces garbage character after pressing return (See video)

Browse Window: With Verse Tab open, when I clicking that verse up/down button in the Browse window, the Verse Tab does not update until I press it a *second* time (or, it advances the Verse Tab more than one verse). Also in multi-version mode in the Browse Window, the verse up/down button stays DOWN after it is clicked.

Verse Tab: In CNTTS click on link to anchor further down on page, click the left arrow (back) button. Crash. (also note the link had to be clicked twice before registering)

Printer support: Crashes when called in Editor. From Flashcards and Diagrammer, job is trapped in print queue and requires manual intervention/login (Printer is network printer requiring auth.)

Minimized window can't be restored by clicking the main icon in the Dock or Launchpad

Use Tab: With Use Tab active, click Version radio button. Move mouse over Browse Window text. The Use Tab updates for the first word under the mouse, but not subsequent words.

Large dropdown listboxes: With Browse Window in JOS, Jwr, when you click on the verse dropdown, the listbox is not placed onscreen.

Related Verses Tool and Phrase Matching Tool, Xref tab: all of the drop down lists (when opened) are sized too small (should be as large as the window) and no scrollbars appear

Large HTML pages take very long time to load e.g. In CHM files, large HTML pages take very long time to load (see Resources | Background | Rodkinson)

Editor, Notes: Pasting selected text from the Editor into Word produced inverse coloring in Word. Copy NAU Rom 8:2-3 from Browse Window to Editor tab, then from Editor tab to Mac Word. Also occurs with Notes tab.

CHM: the toolbar Back and Forward buttons do not always work

Repaired 2012-10-03

Clicking on MS symbols in CNTTS Apparatus in Verse Tab does not follow link.

CHM TOC: In CHMs like Hebrew Paradigms and others, clicking TOC entries does not jump to #anchors. See also jumping from outside (set CL to WTT, psa 50:3, Click Resource Tab, click Gesenius Ref: Psa 50:2-3. Should Open the CHM to the Ps 5:03 reference, but instead opens to top of page)

I'm confused. Is this an actual announcement that Bibleworks is actually coming out with a true native Mac version? Not one that works with Parallels,VMWare Fusion, Crossover, etc? It seemed like just a few weeks ago Michael was saying they would consider it, presumably b/c Accordance is releasing a Windows version. I totally support & applaud the move if it's coming

I'm confused. Is this an actual announcement that Bibleworks is actually coming out with a true native Mac version? Not one that works with Parallels,VMWare Fusion, Crossover, etc? It seemed like just a few weeks ago Michael was saying they would consider it, presumably b/c Accordance is releasing a Windows version. I totally support & applaud the move if it's coming

It's a real announcement.

The native Mac version of BibleWorks runs on OS X using customized compatibility libraries by CodeWeavers. It runs directly on OS X without a virtual machines or machine instruction emulation.

I'm sure you'll hear a lot more about it soon. According to the BW Facebook page, they were going to announce it officially today, but then found a few snags they wanted to fix. Technically I think this post was supposed to be hidden, but you can get to it from the BW official webpage.

I just tried to download and install the Preview version of the "native" Mac version and it is far from a native mac version. Its using X11 which is virtualization. I hope this is a case of confusion on the part of what constitutes a "native Mac app" on the part of BibleWorks. Running in X11 is not native at all. I understand that its costly to start over and code a truly native mac app that does all of the advanced features of Bibleworks, but please don't advertise this as native as Mac users like myself will respond quite negatively to what you're actually offering in this preview.

We've tried to be very clear about what the new Mac version is and is not. The BibleWorks 9 executable is running natively. It runs on compatibility libraries. These libraries do not involve virtualization and do not involve bytecode emulation. They truly are running native. The X11 libraries which they use are native code libraries and even shipped with OS X (from Leopard through Lion, I believe). I think in Mountain Lion, Apple chose not to include the X11 libraries, but they should automatically install with the Mac Public Preview installer and were shipped with OS X in Lion. If they are not automatically installed in Mountain Lion, that is an error and we will address it.

I've also added this sentence to the Mac page: "The underlying technology uses WINE and xQuartz libraries."

From our perspective the compatibility libraries could use some optimization to make them faster, and we plan to address that in future updates.

I hope that makes sense. We're certainly not trying to mislead anyone (that wouldn't help us or our users). The Mac Public Preview is released at no additional cost as another option for our Mac users to try.

Michael

P.S. If you all have suggestions that would better describe the Mac version let us know!

Rv 3

Is there a cost to secure rv 3. My dvds have 1.0 on them. Wouldn't everyone who upfraded initially need to secure the rv 3?

Unfortunately, there is a cost (about $25 for the set). If you are daring and don't mind getting your hands dirty, you can make rev. 1 and 2 DVDs work, but don't recommend it unless you are comfortable with the following steps:

Download and run the installer from the Mac page.

Install BW9 from your BW9 DVDs. You will get a SmartHeap error at the end, and the program will not run.

Kudos

Thanks, Michael, for this help for those who have version 1. I did get my hands dirty - and it installed!
It looks beautiful on my Mac screen and is working better than you promised. I am so appreciative of what you guys have done
that I am sending a small check to BW in the mail tomorrow. Thanks again.

Upgrade Options

For those of us already using BW9 and Crossover....is there a way to upgrade our installation to the new preview rather than doing a fresh install? Don't mind the new install...but I've got a nicely personalized copy and don't quite remember all the tweaks that went into it.

What about those who don't own an optical drive. Many Macs today come without one. I've long ago copied my BW 9 installer discs to a folder on my backup drive and I install this way using Parallels. However, I can't make this work since this tool requires disks. Any other ways for us to install other than buying an optical drive?